How the Great Wall of China Works

The Great Wall of China is incredibly long, and was originally built for military purposes. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the Great Wall.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice skips In, joined by staff writer Jane
the Grass Taylor. Candice, Jane, you near that old proverb
that great fences make great neighbors. Yeah, I think it's true.

(00:23):
It's very true. Like that was one of my favorite
especially if you have a yappy, little dog like idea.
He likes to knows his way into other people's yards.
I have a question for you, actually, did you ever
play the game Rampart video game? Oh, it's a great game.
It's actually you build like castles and walls to keep
out the the enemy forces from coming in just and

(00:44):
burning down your castle. And I think up playing the game,
the hours that I spent were actually prepared me for
this podcast. Has gosh, so the idea today things that
keep people out fences, walls, boundaries. Um uh, the biggest
wall of all what what kinds to mind? Of course?
The Great Wall of China. And yeah, there were other
empires that had big walls before China, Denmark, Korea, and

(01:08):
the Reman Empire. They all had walls before China. Build it.
And the funny thing about the wall is that you know,
when we think about the wall today, we see this
one big labyrinthine landmarks, and that wasn't always the case. No,
it was built in section six sections to be exact,
and they had really nothing to do with each other
in terms of like they were only for their individual

(01:30):
kingdoms precisely. And not much is known about the wall
in terms of its length. Ord's with there's not a
whole lot of standard measurements. Some people think that it's
about miles long. Other people say it's more like four
thousand sixty three miles. And it's wider in some places
and it as in others. And so just get the

(01:52):
sense that it's not uniform by any stretch of the imagination.
That's right to give you a point of reference, Like
they're not even sure how long it is, you know,
you think by today this would be easy to figure out,
but they're actually, Uh, it's so difficult because they're section
of the wall that are buried and and is they're scattered,
and like you said, there are different pieces and look
different ways, so it's hard to find out. They're built

(02:13):
of all different materials. Some are made of brick and
stone and others are made of earth and other strange materials.
And you can really get this sense by studying the
wall that this was a haphazard thing thrown together to
keep out the Huns and other invaders. And that's exactly
what it was. It's like, I'm not much of a gamer,
but Jane, I imagine and rampart. You're doing whatever you can,

(02:35):
scrambling as fast as possible to keep people. Yeah, exactly.
So whatever you decide your bill to build your wall
out of, as long as it's there, it's gonna work.
And well, westerners call it the Great Wall of China.
The Chinese don't really think of it that way. They're like,
it's not so great. It's really long, and that's why
they call it the the long Wall of ten thousand lee.
That's right, and a lee is about half a kilometer

(02:57):
to have you a point of reference, and so the
pe pegs ad at about three thousand miles. But as
we know, we're not really sure. And so people are
actually right now on a mission to determine once and
for all how long the wall is and then think
it's going to be about a four year track because
they have to go through mountains and desert and grasslands.
And this is a study being conducted by the State

(03:18):
Administration of Cultural Heritage as well as the State Bureau
of Surveying and Mapping. And they're starting in the east
by the gebby desert, and they're moving west towards the
Yellow State. That's right. And what's interesting to me about
the Great Wall is that it was done in so
many fits and starts, like even after it was trying
to be unified, which is back about UM. I want
to say the third century. Yeah, that's the third century

(03:39):
Uh where the Chin, which is where China got its
name originally, the Chin emperor Uh wanted to unify China,
and so he tore down some walls that didn't make
sense to him, and he kept up a northern wall
to keep out barbarians like so not even just to
to stop them, but maybe just to delay them so
that when they knew they were coming, you know, the

(04:01):
people UM could rally their defenses. And so this continued
for a while, and it acquired the help of everyone
from commoners to prisoners and criminals and soldiers. Everyone had
to chip in and build this wall. And we know
that thousands and thousands of people die during the construction,
and we also know that some of them are actually

(04:22):
buried inside the wall. That's right. And it's pretty crazy
to think that they're actually not only earth, you know,
packed in but bodies inside the wall. Isn't that wild?
And I'm sure that it's it's bones if even how
long it takes bones to finally disintegrate. But there you
have it. So the Chin dynasty left off around the
third century, and then it didn't really get as um

(04:47):
to be huge of a project until the main dynasty,
and that was around thirteen sixty eight when that dynasty began,
it's right, and they wanted to defend themselves from the
Mongols by that time, and to the same principle again,
you you keep adding length and which the wall to
keep out the invaders. And they had special passes like
they obviously be in order to um have people come
in and out that were like trade et cetera, that

(05:09):
kept the country moving. They had things called passes, but
they had to be heavily guarded by men to make sure,
you know, you kept out the unwanted invaders. Uh So,
but they also what was really cool about by this time,
the wall had a signal towers and as you know,
they didn't have walkie talkies at that time, so in
order and so in order to signal to each other

(05:30):
like hey, there's you know, barbarians on the way sort
of thing. Uh, they would use anything from smoked signals
to banners in the daytime, but at night they had
to use things like lanterns, clappers, or gunfire. And that's
what's so interesting about the Main dynasty because not only
did they add girth to the wall, sometimes double and
triple the wit the width that it had been previously,

(05:52):
they started reinforcing it with military personnel. And so they
had guard towers, and they had beak ends, and they
had all of these extra human reinforcements to make sure
that the invaders stayed out. But it wasn't always successful
because the guards could be pretty easily bribed. Yeah, that's true,
and it it caused some problems, it really did. And

(06:13):
so the Mongols finally, I'm sorry, not the Mongols, the
man Churions. They finally overtook the Main dynasty, and that
was about the seventeenth century. And because they were more
into appeasing the neighboring kingdoms, they weren't as interested in
in a wall, so they basically let it fall into
disrepair exactly. And I think also part of their philosophy was, well,

(06:33):
it couldn't keep us out. Who you're not going to
keep out. It's a pretty useless and you can imagine
that a wall of that size and length, even though
today we talked about about it being in disrepair and ruin,
it would have taken a lot of manpower to keep
it up. And so they decided now it's it's just
not worth it. And so a wall that had been
developing for some two thousand years, it just stopped and

(06:57):
and stood. And that's when things like earthquakes and snow
and wind and rain really exacted their fury on the wall.
But today that natural um, the natural threats aren't as
great as the human threats, that's true. And as time
went on and people actually would would take pieces away,
whether it's to build houses or whatever. Similar thing happened

(07:19):
to the Colisseum. I remember learning Um, where people, you know,
they would just take bricks away. And this wall is
there's a point of pride for China that now you know,
it's it's a point of tourism. Uh so that they
want to keep it up and so um they want
to stop these these things that are destroying it. And
it's worth mentioning too that Chairman Mal was a pretty

(07:41):
gung of advocate of the people taking part of the
wall to build their own homes. You know, progress at
what cost? Well, nothing really, because you're building materials are
coming from something that's already extant um. But as far
as threats from tourism, those are really really serious because
you know, when the Berlin Wall came down, people took
pieces away, but that was fine and dandy because no

(08:02):
one wanted that wall. But the Chinese do want their wall,
and so in tourists came. Even if they're just chipping
away a little brick or a little piece of earth,
it's causing a lot of damage because on average the
wall gets around ten million visitors per year. That's right.
It's kind of ironic because it brings in money for
the country obviously, but it's also causing. It's taking its
own toll in the wall itself, it really is, and

(08:25):
not just from outsiders but insiders too, because finders and
herders will take their livestock there to Gray's or else.
Business people will set up a little vendor stands and
things like that in front of the wall, and it's
just it's damaging not only the structural integrity but also
the aesthetic appeal of the wall. That's right. So today
they try to advise the tourists who don't bring anything,

(08:48):
don't like leave it and and don't take anything away either, right.
And one of the biggest problems they have, or a
couple of the biggest problems driving along the wall in
some places it says, why do you can drive a
car on it? And speaking of that, they've actually cut
roads through the wall itself. So they've taken down sections
of the of the walls so that they can put
roads through, which I can understand, like obviously it would

(09:11):
probably cost a lot of much more money to build
a road that goes over the wall. But but still
it's it's pretty said. Well, it's strange to think about too,
because I think that attitudes towards the wall are shifting,
or at least they have been. If Chairman Mao is
encouraging people to take apart the wall, you can imagine
that for the sake of bolstering infrastructure, people would support
the idea of just knocking through it if necessary. But

(09:34):
now people are starting to acknowledge it more as a
world landmark, and it's actually one of the few landmarks
that cartographers put on maps. And despite what people say,
you cannot see it from space. Yeah, And that's it's
an interesting actually myth that you bring up about not
seeing it from space, because the Chinese are actually kind
of proud of this claim. They're like, oh, yeah, our
landmark can be seen from space. But this, this myth

(09:56):
actually dates back to a cartoon, uh from Ripley's Believe
It or Not, and it the cartoon claimed that this
is the mightiest work of man, the only one that
could be visible to the human human eye from the moon,
and this myth persisted throughout the space age, even um,
so that you know, Apollo astronauts would like, look for
the Great Wall or whatever. But actually, um, there are

(10:19):
shades of truth. Even though the Great Wall is definitely
not visible from the moon. You know, no structure really
is from the moon, but from space you can actually, um,
some astronauts say you can barely see it. Um. But
what's interesting about this is that you can see other
man made structures much much better, whether they be um
highways or you know, the Pyramids even can be seen
a little bit better than the Great Wall. So it's

(10:41):
shades of truth. But don't believe everything you hear. But
as far as I guess that the permanence and the
honor that the wall brings, I mean, you're right that
that would be a really honorable claim to fame, that
you can see the wall from space, even if it's
not true. So I can understand hanging onto that. But
to know that about the wall is on is in
ruins and only it is in reasonable condition, that's you know,

(11:05):
it's been a real source of hurt for people who
are starting to recognize it as a link to their past.
And so in two thousand seven, when it was chosen
as one of the new Wonders of the World, I
think a lot of commissions and organizations were they had
fuel added to their fire of keep preservation. And back
in two thousand three, Beijing was one of the first

(11:27):
places that the wall covers to enact regulations for keeping
up the wall and to impose fines on people who
drove on it or and they must have one of
the worst problems with it, since it's such a bustling city, right,
and one of the biggest problems they have, I think
is raves people having races on the wall, which to
me is just inconceivable. But then a couple of years later,

(11:50):
or contemporary to Beijing's policies actually going into law, China
enacted a national policy against desecration of the wall, so
no ray of no carving, no driving, and if you do,
and you're a member of an organization or a group,
you're gonna pay upwards to around sixty tho U S dollars.
And if you're an individual dessec crediting the wall, I
think it's around six thousand US. Of course that's harder

(12:12):
to enforce around the rural areas, it is, and that's
one of the biggest problems with the wall is that
in the rural areas, you know, you're having problems with
the herders and livestock damaging the wall. Not as many
prize uh. And you can find out more about all
different kinds of subjects from the history of China to
Beijing to the Olympics at how stuff works dot com

(12:38):
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